


Follow the Path

by ilcuoreardendo



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Creepy, Episode: s02e17 Into the Woods, F/M, Gen, Van Dahl Manor, cannibal jokes, coming home, possessive oswald
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-19
Updated: 2016-04-19
Packaged: 2018-06-03 06:09:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6599848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilcuoreardendo/pseuds/ilcuoreardendo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A long time friend of Oswald’s, he sent you away during the Galavan mess. When you return to Gotham, you find home is not, and may never be, as it was. </p><p>  <i>He drinks, eyes you over the rim of his glass. “No. It was better for you not to be here. You didn’t need to see what they….made of me. It’s bad enough you’re here to see what I made of them.”</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Follow the Path

**Author's Note:**

> Despite my reservations about how they're treating Oswald's character (particularly whether the writers will be able to provide the narrative support to Oswald's M.O. shift in a way that doesn't just feel tacked on so they could introduce a new plot arc), I was spurred to write something for the end of that episode. To play with the macabrely pretty imagery of the dining room scene, if nothing else. 
> 
> Originally written and posted at my Tumblr. Follow me there for more fandom stuff: [Ilcuoreardendo-Fic](http://ilcuoreardendo-fic.tumblr.com).

* * *

 

 _I could possibly be fading_  
_Or have something more to gain_  
_I could feel myself growing colder_  
_I could feel myself under your fate_

 _\- “_ Into Dust,” Mazzy Star

 

* * *

 

It’s late afternoon when you finally arrive in Gotham, the sun beginning its descent toward the horizon, casting the city into cool shades, lengthening shadows. Part of you wishes to do nothing more than return to your apartment and ensure it still stands (and stands in your name, per Oswald’s promise). Perhaps you would curl up under the covers of your bed and not leave it for a week, mourning the loss of everything that had been.

That sounds like a really good idea.

Instead, you hail a cab outside the train station, give the driver the address you’d been sent well over a week ago and settle back for the long journey to the outskirts of the city. What’s one more hour tacked onto the last leg of your four day journey?

It’s night by the time you arrive at the Van Dahl manor. The great house rises up out of the gloom, moonlit pale against the sky, the dark windows offering no clue as to what you might find inside. For a moment, you consider asking the cab driver to stay. But you shake your head, close the door, watch the car disappear down the road. Shouldering your bag, you trudge up the front steps and ring the bell.

Once.

Twice.

When there’s no answer, you check your phone again, swipe a quick question into the ongoing conversation and hit send. A moment and no word later, you reach for the door handle. It turns easily.

“Hello?” you call. Pushing the door open you’re greeted by a foyer, dark and empty and stretching out almost endlessly before you like something out of a Stephen King novel. It’s too quiet, too still. Cold settles in the pit of your stomach.

“Oswald?” Your voice hits the dark paneling of the walls, bounces back to you, the echo strange in your ears. You sit your bags just inside the entrance, hesitate for a moment, then shut the door and move further into the house.

The heels of your shoes are far too loud on the hardwood floor. From somewhere deeper in the manor, you hear the unmistakable tick and chime of a grandfather clock hitting the hour. The house creaks and seems to sigh as you continue down the hall. You spy the flicker of light around a corner and follow it, a domestic will-o’-the-wisp showing you the way.

The light, it turns out, is coming from the fireplace, and a few dim lamps, in a dining room so spacious it could house two of your apartments. In the center of the room is a formal dining table set with China that likely costs more than your year’s rent, a decanter of red wine that gleams almost black in the dimness, an array of covered dishes, and two large serving platters filled with roast.

At one end of the table sits a woman, her hair piled into an intricate twist. She might have been beautiful once, but death has frozen her face in a blood flecked grimace. The wound across her neck is still seeping and it’s then you become cognizant of the taste and odor of copper on the air, lighting on the back of your tongue. You swallow, hard.

At the other end of the table, sitting behind a three-armed candelabra, sipping wine out of a crystal goblet, is Oswald. He looks not unlike you had last seen him, standing by his mother’s graveside as Gertrude was lowered into the earth, pressing a train ticket into your hand. He hadn’t said anything, didn’t need to. His silence and the wanness of his face had said it all. He’d already lost more than was acceptable, he wouldn’t continue taking the risk. And while you bristled under authority, had never taken orders from Oswald (no matter how much he beguiled), you took this one. That evening, a train had carried you south, and a bus east, down to some of your relatives, half forgotten, on the South Carolina coast.

It’s a moment before Oswald spies you over the rim of his glass, his mouth breaking into that wide and familiar grin that holds, perhaps, a touch more mania than it used to. He sets his goblet down, claps his hands together. “____, what a surprise!” And then, he seems to remember something, his face losing expression as he asks, “What are you doing here?”

“I got your message. About you meeting your father. You asked me to come.”

“I sent that weeks ago,” he says, eyes cast down.

“I’ve only just been able to get back to town,” you say, walking slowly around the table, not looking too closely at the body, but taking care to avoid getting blood on your shoes, to not touch anything. You may not have been a part of Oswald’s world, but you weren’t stupid.

“You told me to go, remember? And down in the Carolina sticks, the cell reception’s spotty as hell. Bus schedules aren’t any better. I think they run on their own standard time. It was a nightmare,” you finish, drawing close to his chair. His face is flecked with blood, shining red across the bridge of his nose like macabre freckles, glossy-black along the blade of his cheekbone, beneath the curve of his lower lip. You glance back at Oswald’s silent table mate and say, “I guess I’m not the only one that had a nightmare. Is she….” You trail off, but the question is obvious.

“Grace. My father’s wife,” he confirms. You’d been able to pull up some information on the Van Dahls on the train back to Gotham. More specifically, you had pulled up Elijah’s obituary, the sight of which had left your stomach hollow and your throat sore as you recalled the tone of the text message that had sent you scurrying back home. The picture in the paper included Elijah, wife Grace, children Sasha and Charles. A handsome family, to be sure. You could see Oswald in Elijah’s features. Oswald wasn’t mentioned in the obituary.

“What happened?”  

Oswald’s lips pull tight, slacken as he turns words over in his mouth. “They took him from me.” He pauses. His breath shudders. “They took my _family_.”

You get the feeling there’s more to that last word than you know, the way it rolls off Oswald’s tongue, hot and bitter and longing. There’s nothing you can say that will even begin to make this better. But still, “I’m sorry,” you breathe.

“You weren’t here.” He sniffs, reaches for the decanter and fills his goblet again.

You bristle, pull your spine straighter. “I know. And maybe that’s my fuc—fault for not doing what I usually do, which is ignore what you tell me.”

He drinks, eyes you over the rim of his glass. “No. It was better for you not to be here. You didn’t need to see what they….made of me. It’s bad enough you’re here to see what I made of them.”

The phrase strikes something in you, makes you catch your breath, glance around the room with renewed interest. “Her children? Oswald. What did you _do_?”

“Nothing,” he says, staring into his glass, “that they weren’t asking of me. She wanted a Sunday roast. I obliged.” He chuckles and his voice takes on an edge as he sinks back in his chair, says, “Unfortunately, she soon discovered that high breeding doesn’t mean good taste.”

You refuse to turn and look at the spread on the table. Instead, you focus your gaze at a point just over Oswald’s shoulder, and slow your breathing. He watches you for a moment before asking sedately, “Are you going to leave now?”

“Do you want me to go?” You close your eyes, count your breaths, count your memories. You’ve been there. Maybe not always when you should and maybe, _sometimes_ , too often when you shouldn’t.

You were there when Oswald was just like anyone else trying to make it through the ravages of high school. When he first started working for Fish Mooney. On the nights he wouldn’t go home because Gertrude would see the bruises on his face, the split lips gained from teaching one of Mooney’s flunkies a lesson, or from not always holding his tongue when he should have. You were there when he showed up on your doorstep, looking terribly alive for a dead man. When he was so angry at Maroni for upsetting his mother that all he could do was pace and rant across the floor of your apartment, blood still fresh on his hands and the similarly-spattered flowers he’d shown up at your door with wilting in the sink. When he finally – _finally_ – had his plans come together, when Gotham’s rule was his. You had been there.

You were still here.

“No,” Oswald says, a whisper, and then stronger, “No.” You feel his hand in yours, fingers sliding between your own, warm and familiar. “You—you make everything feel like it was,” he says, and laughs, dry, brittle.

He raises your hand to his mouth. His lips are warm and smooth and, you think — _yes_ — that’s the flicker of his tongue on your skin. The sensation makes your head whirl, makes you open your eyes to see if you could be wrong, if your mind is playing tricks on you.

Oswald’s watching you. The look on his face is one you’ve only ever seen directed at things he fully intends to have. You saw it on nights when Mooney left him, however momentarily, in charge of the club; you saw it when Maroni appointed him restaurant manager; you saw it when he showed up at your apartment, smelling heavily like the night and gunpowder, the faintest hint of blood, and talking of his plans for his kingdom, now that Maroni and Fish were dead.

You lean heavily against the table, rattling the China and the flatware.

Oswald lifts your other hand from where you’ve gripped the lacquered wood of the table, brings it to his mouth and gives it the same treatment as the other. He tugs you close, to stand between his knees, the fine fabric of his pants brushing against your legs, beneath the hem of your skirt.

“You’re all I have left,” Oswald says. “I’m not letting you go.”


End file.
